Perhaps Maxis and / or PayPal can highlight which specific aspect of their partnership helps in enhancing the consumer experience. After all, even without such a partnership, it is possible to visit any merchant's website on a mobile phone and pay by PayPal without having to enter payment details, regardless of who is the mobile network operator. It can be argued that, using a mobile phone, there's a lot of friction in navigating a merchant's website that is not optimized for mobile browsing. While that's right, fact is, only the merchant can do something about making the experience frictionless. I am not sure what role PayPal or the MNO can play in that.
17 May 2010 13:51 Read comment
100% false positive is quite interesting to note because most studies citing shortcomings of fingerprint authentication point to true negatives where the genuine customers are rejected by the reader if their fingers are sweaty, have a cut, or for other trivial reasons. Accepting that it's easy to fool the reader using gelatine, won't it be difficult for an impostor to obtain the "true fingerprint" off of a genuine customer?
13 May 2010 16:47 Read comment
In my exposure to mobile banking in the UK (Barclays) and India (ICICI, HDFC) over the past couple of years, I have rarely found any functionality that leverages its key differentiators of being mobile and handheld. For example, I don't see much point in finding out my account balance or Last 3 transactions via my mobile phone, when I can very well do it thru' Internet Banking lot more conveniently. On the other hand, if I could pay my bills wherever I am by simply typing a PAY command on my mobile handset in response to an incoming SMS alert, that would save me a lot of time as compared to doing this via Internet Banking and encourage me to use mobile banking more. While customers like a responsive bank, when it comes to mobile banking, I think banks can take some time out to figure out strong use cases for mobile banking, instead of pushing it out the door as just another channel.
13 May 2010 16:36 Read comment
Whether it's ACH or Expedited Payments in the US, FPS or BACS in the UK, or NEFT in India, most bank provided electronic person-to-person solutions that I'm familiar with require the sender to know the receiver's bank account number and sort code (among other information) and enter them accurately. The sender is held totally responsible in case they end up entering incorrect information for whatever reasons. I have yet to come across a single bank that verifies the information in real-time and assures the sender that the entered combination of account name and sort code indeed belongs to the intended receiver.
This is bound to cause a lot of anxiety to many people, thereby reducing the number of people who go ahead with using these eP2P products, especially when they face no such complications when they write a cheque. I am sure this stunts mass adoption of eP2P products, something that might be borne out if banks monitor "abandonment rates" on their eP2P transaction screens.
Against this backdrop, FiServ's product sounds promising. By asking the sender to only enter the recipient's email address or mobile phone number, it removes a major area of friction that afflicts all present eP2P solutions. As a result, it should gain rapid popularity among customers of banks. However, since it has the potential to cannibalize usage of alternative fee-generating products already offered by banks, it remains to be seen how extensively FiServ manages to gain their acceptance.
12 May 2010 08:08 Read comment
When sellers get together to set prices and other terms, that's called cartelization, which is illegal in many parts of the world. If that be the case, should buyers be permitted to get together for a similar purpose?
30 Apr 2010 18:46 Read comment
As the story of PayByTouch illustrates, biometric payment at the point of sale might be a solution chasing a problem. This well-known American startup burned through close to US$ 200M in providing a fingerprint-based payment system for supermarket checkout before it went bankrupt.
On the one hand, vendors claim that their solutions can differentiate between a live organ and a dead one, but on the other, we have a Dan Brown bestseller in which villains kill someone only to harvest their eyes to break through a highly-secure system based on iris scanning.
To make sure that a nick in one finger doesn't result in a false-rejection, vendors have started fingerprinting more than one finger - in fact, one state in India has implemented a solution that uses prints from all ten fingers!
I don't think biometric payments come anywhere close to the convenience of cash or credit card - at least not in their present form. And going by the processing fees of PayByTouch, they don't seem to be much cheaper either.
16 Apr 2010 17:23 Read comment
Good observation! I'm seeing more and more cases of banks, telcos and government agencies rejecting the electronic medium.
While claiming a tax refund from the UK HMRC, I found out that, while I could file the return via Internet, they refused any communication by email. Only snail-mail was allowed.
During my several year-long ordeal to collect my social security refund from the federal authority in Germany, they accept signed letters sent by fax, but their letters are always sent by snail mail, which takes 10-14 days to reach me in India. Citing EU data protection laws, they refuse to talk about any personally identifiable information on the phone and refuse email altogether.
I've begun wondering if the near-obsolete fax machine is making a quiet comeback!
07 Apr 2010 09:17 Read comment
Voice based authentication has been tried in the past - I am aware of at least one provider in the US. At the time, several years ago, the technology wasn't fully mature and there were instances of genuine account holders with a sore throat finding their access blocked! If the technology has matured since then, voice verification is surely an option that strikes a good balance between security and convenience.
02 Apr 2010 12:35 Read comment
I don't know about Japan but there has been no recent change in regulation in India as regards inbound cross-border remittance licensing. According to PayPal's own communication to its customers in India - I being one of them - "the RBI has told us that PayPal needs specific approvals to allow personal remittances to India, which we currently do not have. Until we get these approvals, personal payments into India will remain suspended." It seems like PayPal did business without a license all these years. It's just that its non-compliance with pre-existing regulation got exposed recently.
31 Mar 2010 19:16 Read comment
While bill payment hyperlinks are prominently displayed on many retail banking NetBanking websites, an attractive bill pay widget will definitely draw more eyeballs. But, after customers are attracted to bill pay, making the actual payment process more frictionless is key to conversion and greater adoption of this functionality. In the non electronic bill payment world, the customer simply presents the bill to the person at the counter, hands over cash or card, and the transaction is done. Whereas, in electronic bill payment, the need to pre-register the bill causes significant friction, especially when the lead time from pre-registration to actual posting of the bill is often a few weeks, by which time the deadline for that bill has elapsed and the customer goes back to manual bill pay. If only the widget could be enhanced so that it supports one-off and on-demand bill payment, adoption of electronic bill pay would be significantly bolstered.
30 Mar 2010 17:15 Read comment
Tamas KadarFounder and CEO at SEON
Peter BakkerFounder and CEO at Unhedged
Walid HosniFounder and CEO at GXEGY
Aron AlexanderFounder and CEO at Runa
Roman EloshviliFounder and CEO at XData Group
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